Romeoville approves ﬂooring contract for events center

ROMEOVILLE – Basketball enthusiasts will get to play on NBA and college-caliber courts when Romeoville’s new Athletic and Events Center opens, after the village board of trustees approved a contract to install removable courts Wednesday night.

The board during their regular meeting Wednesday at Village Hall approved a $463,000 contract with Connor Sports Flooring, a Salt Lake City-based company that specializes in basketball court flooring, to install six more basketball courts in the center.

“[Part] of the impetus for this is interest in the center,” Mayor John Noak said, referencing plans to host a major youth basketball tournament affiliated with NIKE in April. “You’ll start to understand why this is becoming a very exciting facility.”

The courts are being paid for through tax increment financing district funds, with funds coming back through the hotel-motel tax and concession sales.

Connor Sports Flooring is the official surface of the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Final Four tournaments. It also installed the courts for professional and college teams like the Boston Celtics, Oklahoma City Thunder, University of Florida and University of Louisville.

The company will install six of its QuickLock basketball courts in the center, which will be portable and can be removed to reveal artificial turf for soccer and other events in the winter months.

The village planned for the center, located on the corner of Normantown Road and Route 53 and fully opening around April 1, to become a catalyst for attracting new business to the Route 53 corridor.

“A lot of people worked on the plans and put a lot of time in it,” Noak said of when the village was deciding how to develop the corridor. “We also looked at how other communities did it. This was a collaborative effort.”

Noak added how the center gives a boost to existing businesses in the area and attracts people from outside Romeoville to the city center.

Hosting the NIKE tournament, which includes 370 teams with the best high school basketball players in the Midwest competing in front of brand name college coaches like University of Kentucky’s John Calipari and Duke University’s Mike Krzyzewski, is an example of how the center will help drive local business in Romeoville, Village Manager Steve Gulden said.

The board also updated and organized the zoning code to reflect current times, changed the liquor code to allow conditional licenses for businesses wanting to include video gaming and liquor on their establishments, and voted to raise the motel-hotel tax from 6 percent of rent to 9 percent of rent.

Also on Wednesday, the board congratulated Director of Parks and Recreation Kelly Rajzer on an exceptional workplace award won by the department.